WASHINGTON (Dispatches) - 
European and U.S. investigations have documented Romania’s role in the CIA’s secret detention program, while a court ruling found Bucharest had helped facilitate the illegal imprisonment and torture of detainees, a report says.
The CIA opened the Bucharest detention site in 2003 as part of a network of secret prisons established by Washington after the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to recently released court records and a 2019 Rendition Project report.
Romania reportedly received $8 million from the CIA, followed by millions more, while then-President Ion Iliescu acknowledged in 2015 that he approved a U.S. request for a black site as “a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to NATO.”
“I did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site,” Iliescu said.
Detainees at the site were subjected to prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, shackling, exposure to continuous lighting, forced standing and other brutal interrogation methods, with court records documenting the facility’s harsh conditions.
The facility reportedly consisted of six cells designed to keep detainees disoriented, with continuous fluorescent lighting earning the site the name “Bright Light,” while court records also documented painful stress positions and forced rectal feeding.
In a landmark 2018 ruling, the European Court of Human Rights found that Romania had hosted a secret CIA prison and had “cooperated in the preparation and execution” of the U.S. rendition and detention program while knowing its nature and purpose.
The court also found that Romania had violated the rights of detainees by facilitating their torture and subsequently failing to conduct an effective investigation into the abuses.
A 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the CIA’s euphemistically-called “enhanced interrogation” program failed to produce unique intelligence that could not have been obtained through other means, while the agency misled Congress and the public about its operations.
The CIA also briefed Romanian officials in 2004 on the detention program, with a subsequent investigation finding that the presentation “clearly described” the use of torture, further undermining Bucharest’s long-standing denials of knowledge about the abuses.
The Senate report found that the CIA had detained at least 119 people in its secret program and subjected them to its interrogation techniques, many without proper authorization, exposing the scale of Washington’s post-9/11 torture system.
The investigation also found that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to oversight bodies about the program, helping conceal the extent of the abuses and its failure to produce unique intelligence.
Romania later closed its domestic investigation into the abuses without identifying a perpetrator, prompting the Council of Europe to express “profound regret” that Bucharest had failed to establish the facts.
The program continues to haunt the long-delayed 9/11 prosecution, with a U.S. military judge ruling in 2025 that statements by the detainees were involuntary and inadmissible because they remained tainted by torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in CIA custody.
The 9/11 trial is now scheduled for June 5, 2028, but the torture carried out in the CIA’s secret prisons has already cast a lasting shadow over the proceedings.